Quotes from Thomas Merton

And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.

There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.

Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.

For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.

How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all.

Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers.

The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable

May God prevent us from becoming "right-thinking men"-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.

Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God: for it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice and mediocrity and materialism and selfishness that have chilled his faith.

Modern man believes he is fruitful and productive when his ego is aggressively affirmed, when he is visibly active, and when his action produces obvious results.

And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.

Indeed, it is a kind of quintessence of pride to hate and fear even the kind and legitimate approval of those who love us! I mean, to resent it as a humiliating patronage.

No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers.

One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.

The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.

You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt.

How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city?

Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God.

To love our nothingness we must love everything in us that the proud man loves when he loves himself. But we must love it all for exactly the opposite reason.

The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not a man of faith.

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another

The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.

Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real